o,
right-wing columnist Robert Novak now says that Richard Armitage,
Novaks initial source on the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame,
wasnt just some loose-lipped gossip blurting out her name, but rather
that Armitage urged Novak to write about Plames alleged role in her
husbands fact-finding trip to Niger.

In a Sept. 14 column, Novak calls Armitages recent
depiction of their July 2003 conversation deceptive for suggesting
that Armitages leaking of Plames CIA identity was innocent and inadvertent,
when Novak recalled it as intentional and even calculating.

Yet, for the past two weeks, major Washington
journalists have been treating Armitages account as the gospel truth
and, further, as proof that George W. Bushs White House had gotten a
bum rap on the Plame-leak scandal.

This misplaced conventional wisdom extended from
the Washington Posts editorial pages to virtually every major TV chat
show  and even touched off another round of personal attacks by Bush
allies against Plames husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson,
for having dared to stand up to the President over his false claims that
Iraq sought uranium ore from Niger.

According to these press pundits, the real victim in
the Plame case was Bushs political adviser Karl Rove, who had suffered
under suspicions that he had orchestrated a smear campaign against
Wilson for becoming, in July 2003, one of the first Washington insiders
to accuse Bush of having twisted intelligence to justify invading
Iraq.

Despite reams of evidence that Rove did
participate in such a smear campaign  and also was a source on Plames
identity for at least two journalists  prominent opinion leaders
rallied to Roves defense, chastising news outlets that had pointed
fingers at Rove.

In a Sept. 7 article, entitled One Leak
and a Flood of Silliness, veteran Washington Post columnist David
Broder wrote that publications which had made these allegations owe
Karl Rove an apology. And all of journalism needs to relearn the lesson:
Can the conspiracy theories and stick to the facts.

But it now appears that it was Broder and
other see-no-evil pundits who were ignoring the facts as well as the
well-worn pattern of the Bush administration attacking Iraq
War critics.

Indeed, if anyone deserves chastising for
unprofessional journalism, it would be Broder and other mainstream
journalists who continue wearing blinders that so limit their field of
vision that  after all these years  they still cant believe that Rove
and the White House would play dirty to discredit anyone who challenges
Bush.

On Sept. 3, I wrote that this clueless
behavior of these Washington journalists  in the face of so much
damning evidence  justified the old Shawshank Redemption question
posed to the corrupt prison warden: How can you be so obtuse? [See
Consortiumnews.coms How
Obtuse Is the U.S. Press?]

Armitage Myth

Beyond the specific evidence of a White
House campaign to out covert CIA officer Valerie Plame and the broader
Republican hostility toward anyone who gets in Bushs way, there is also
the notion that Armitage, long considered a tough team player, was an
independent soul who would never help the administration discredit a
troublesome critic.

Though Armitage may not have been one of
Bushs intimates nor a leading enthusiast for invading Iraq in 2003, the
Washington press corps is exaggerating both Armitages independence and
his anti-war credentials.

Virtually forgotten in all the news
coverage was the fact that in 1998, Armitage was one of the 18
signatories to
a seminal letter from the neoconservative Project for the New
American Century urging President Bill Clinton to oust Saddam Hussein by
military force if necessary.

Armitage joined a host of neoconservative
icons, such as Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, William Kristol, Richard
Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Many of the signers, including Donald Rumsfeld,
would become architects of Bushs Iraq War policy five years later.

A well-placed conservative source, who
knows both Armitage and Rove, told me that the two operatives are much
closer than many in official Washington understand. Armitage and Rove
grew to be friends when they were negotiating plans for bringing Colin
Powell into the Bush administration in 2000, when Armitage represented
Powell and Rove stood in for Bush.

After the administration took office, Rove
and Armitage remained in frequent communication, becoming a back channel
for sharing sensitive information between the White House and the State
Department, the source said.

Beyond these relationships, there is also evidence that Armitage was
part of a classic Washington scheme to slip Plames identity into the
newspapers, albeit with plenty of deniability for all involved.

The evidence about Armitages role in
leaking Plames identity  and thus destroying her CIA career as an
undercover counter-proliferation operative  now includes Novaks
account of their July 8, 2003, interview as Novak described it in his
Sept. 14, 2006, column, entitled Armitages Leak.

Toward the end of the hour-long meeting, Novak
wrote, he asked Armitage, the then-Deputy Secretary of State, why former
Ambassador Wilson, had been sent on the trip to Africa. (Novak doesnt
say whether he was one of the journalists who had been urged by the
White House to pursue that line of questioning.)

Novak wrote that Armitage told me unequivocally
that Mrs. Wilson worked in the CIAs Counter-proliferation Division and
that she had suggested her husbands mission. As for his current
implication that he [Armitage] never expected this to be published, he
noted that the story of Mrs. Wilsons role fit the style of the old
Evans-Novak column  implying to me that it continued reporting
Washington inside information.

In other words, Novak acknowledges two significant
points: that he asked why Ambassador Wilson was chosen and that Armitage
knew that Plame held a sensitive CIA position, yet still wanted her
exposed.

Deniable Leak

What is not clear from Novaks account is whether
anyone in the administration planted the idea of asking about Wilsons
trip in Novaks head, knowing that the Plame information had been
distributed sufficiently at senior levels of the administration that it
likely would be divulged by someone.

Rather than Broders claim that this idea of an
orchestrated leak is some kind of conspiracy theory, it actually is a
fairly common Washington technique for getting out damaging information
about an adversary, spreading the news around the government and then
urging reporters to ask about it.

Plus, there is solid evidence that the White House
conducted just such an operation.

A month before Wilsons Iraq-Niger Op-Ed article
appeared in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, Vice President Dick
Cheney already was anticipating possible trouble from the former
ambassador whose trip to Africa had helped disprove the bogus claims
that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium ore from Niger.

So, Cheneys chief of staff Lewis Libby requested a
report on Wilson from Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, a
neoconservative ally. In violation of the strict rules against
jeopardizing the covert identity of CIA officers, Grossmans report,
dated June 10, 2003, tossed in a reference to Valerie Plame as
Wilsons wife.

CIA Director George Tenet also divulged to Cheney
that Wilsons wife worked for the CIA and had a hand in arranging
Wilsons trip to Niger  information that Cheney then passed on to Libby
in a conversation on June 12, 2003, according to Libbys notes as
described by lawyers in the case. [NYT, Oct. 25, 2005]

Those two facts  Plames work for the CIA and her
minor role in Wilsons Niger trip (which was approved and arranged at
higher levels of the CIA)  were transformed into attack points against
Wilson, to suggest nepotism and to question Wilsons manhood.

On June 23, 2003, still two weeks before Wilsons
article, Libby briefed New York Times reporter Judith Miller about
Wilson and, according to a later retrospective by the Times, may then
have passed on the tip that Wilsons wife worked at the CIA.

The anti-Wilson campaign gained new urgency when
the ex-ambassador penned his Op-Ed article for the New York Times on
July 6, 2003.

As Cheney read Wilsons article, What I Didnt
Find in Africa, the Vice President scribbled down questions he wanted
pursued. Have they [CIA officials] done this sort of thing before?
Cheney wrote. Send an Amb[assador] to answer a question? Do we
ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send
him on a junket?

Though Cheney did not write down Plames name, his
questions indicated that he was aware that she worked for the CIA and
was in a position (dealing with WMD issues) to have a hand in her
husbands assignment to check out the Niger reports. [Cheneys notations
were disclosed in a May 12, 2006, court filing by special prosecutor
Patrick Fitzgerald.]

On the morning of July 6, 2003, Wilson appeared on
NBCs Meet the Press to elaborate on the Niger dispute. Later that
day, Armitage arranged for a copy of Grossmans memo to be sent to Air
Force One, where Secretary of State Powell was accompanying
President Bush and other senior officials on a state trip to Africa.

On July 8, 2003, two days after Wilsons article,
Libby gave Judith Miller more details about the Wilsons. Cheneys chief
of staff said Wilsons wife worked at a CIA unit responsible for weapons
intelligence and non-proliferation. It was in the context of that
interview, that Miller wrote down the words Valerie Flame, an apparent
misspelling of Mrs. Wilsons maiden name. [NYT, Oct. 16, 2005]

On that same day, Novak elicited the information
from Armitage about the role of Wilsons wife in arranging the Niger
trip.

Planted Question

Meanwhile, Time magazine correspondent John
Dickerson, who was on the presidential trip to Africa, was getting
prodded by other administration officials to ask about the seemingly
insignificant question of who had been involved in arranging Wilsons
trip.

On July 11, 2003, as Bush was finishing a meeting
with the president of Uganda, Dickerson said he was chatting with a
senior administration official who was tearing down Wilson and
disparaging Wilsons Niger investigation. The message to Dickerson was
that some low-level person at the CIA was responsible for the mission
and that Dickerson should go ask the CIA who sent Wilson.

Later, Dickerson discussed Wilson with a second senior
administration official and got the same advice: This official also
pointed out a few times that Wilson had been sent by a low-level CIA
employee and encouraged me to follow that angle, Dickerson recalled.

At the end of the two conversations I wrote down in my notebook:
look who sent. What struck me was how hard both officials were
working to knock down Wilson. [See Dickersons article, Wheres
My Subpoena? for Slate, Feb. 7, 2006]

Back in Washington on July 11, 2003, Dickersons
Time colleague, Matthew Cooper, was getting a similar earful from Bushs
political adviser Rove, who tried to steer Cooper away from Wilsons
critical statements about the twisted Niger intelligence.

Rove added that the Niger trip was authorized by
Wilsons wife, who apparently works at the agency [CIA] on WMD issues,
according to Coopers notes of the interview. [See Newsweek, July 18,
2005, issue]

Cooper later got the information about Wilsons
wife confirmed by Cheneys chief of staff Libby, who had already been
peddling the information to Miller.

On July 12, 2003, in a telephone conversation,
Miller and Libby returned to the Wilson topic. Millers notes contain a
reference to a Victoria Wilson, another misspelled reference to
Wilsons wife. [NYT, Oct. 16, 2005]

Two days later, on July 14, 2003, Novak  having
gotten confirmation about Plames identity from Karl Rove  published a
column, citing two administration sources outing Plame as a CIA officer
and portraying Wilsons Niger trip as a case of nepotism.

But the White House counterattack against Wilson
had only just begun. On July 20, 2003, NBCs correspondent Andrea
Mitchell told Wilson that senior White House sources had called her to
stress the real story here is not the 16 words [from Bushs State of
the Union speech about the Niger suspicions] but Wilson and his wife.

The next day, Wilson said he was told by MSNBCs
Chris Matthews that I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He says
and I quote, Wilsons wife is fair game.

'Given to Me'

When Newsday spoke with Novak  before he decided
to clam up  the columnist said he had been approached by administration
sources with the information about Plame. I didnt dig it out, it was
given to me, Novak said. They thought it was significant, they gave me
the name and I used it. [Newsday, July 22, 2003]

More than three years later, in his Sept. 14, 2006,
column, Novak is reiterating that early claim, indicating that Armitage
was one of those who pushed Plames identity. But, also note Novaks use
of the plural in referring to the administration officials who gave him
the Plame information: They thought it was significant, they gave me
the name.

Novaks comment and the wealth of other evidence
suggest that he was, indeed, just one cog in a broader campaign to get Plames name into the press. It wasnt a case of some tidbit casually
mentioned as gossip by Armitage and then reluctantly confirmed by poor
Karl Rove, which is the current conventional wisdom of Washington.

Novaks contemporaneous comment to Newsday fits
with the pattern of facts that is now established about the
administrations organized leak of Plames name, as well as with a
common-sense understanding of how this White House operates when Bush
faces criticism.

In a court filing  after indicting Libby on five
counts of perjury, lying to investigators and obstruction of justice 
special prosecutor Fitzgerald said his investigation had
uncovered government documents that could be characterized as
reflecting a plan to discredit, punish, or seek revenge against Mr.
Wilson because of his criticism of the administrations handling of the
Iraq-Niger allegations.

Without doubt  based simply on the public record 
the evidence clearly supports Fitzgeralds conclusion.

Beyond the Plame leak, the White House also oversaw
a public-relations strategy to denigrate Wilson. The Republican National
Committee put out talking points ridiculing Wilson, and the
Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee made misleading claims
about his honesty in a WMD report.

Rather than thank Wilson for undertaking a
difficult fact-finding trip to Niger for no pay  and for reporting
accurately about the dubious Iraq-Niger claims  the Bush administration
and its many media allies sought instead to smear the former ambassador.

The Republican National Committee even posted an
article entitled Joe Wilsons Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies and
Misstatements, which itself used glaring inaccuracies and misstatements
to discredit Wilson. [For details, see Consortiumnews.coms Novak
Recycles Gannon on Plame-gate.]

Meanwhile, with her undercover work and her career
in ruins, Plame quit the CIA. She and her husband have since filed a
lawsuit against some of the administration officials implicated in the
leak.

Yet, David Broder and many other Washington
journalists either still dont get it  how the administration set out
to destroy this couple and make them an example for other potential
critics  or perhaps the pundits are as willfully obtuse as the corrupt
prison warden in Shawshank Redemption.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra
stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine,
the Press & 'Project Truth.'